I’ve slipped and slid for a year now, gaining back 70 pounds of a 120-pound weight loss. Yes, I’ve had my stressers during that period, but really, “There’s nothing to it but to do it,” as Jean Stapleton said in Damn Yankees. Thirty of those bastards came back, Little Sheba, during my job hunt, when the self esteem was dangling by a thread. The other forty were Thank-God-it’s-over comfort pounds once I actually got a job and could breathe again. I get it, that’s me. But okay, now, Stevie, it’s back to it.
I’ve carved out a life for me now (thanks to the cash infusion of a little thing called steady income) and I have everything in place for me to be well - sweet apartment, gorgeous swimming pool, easy job, great co-workers, reliable car, rice cooker – it’s all there. I realize, though, that I’m a guy who needs time to adjust, to people, places, apartments, jobs, weather, whatever. Although in essence I’m a go-with-the-flow type, at the slightest increase in anxiety or stress I reach for the cheddar, mayo and artisan bread. This is especially true when I’m living alone and there’s nothing standing in the way of me doing exactly what I want, no societal disdain or a disapproving glance from a housemate. So it’s been a party in my pantry here these last three months, and my gleaming new stainless steel toaster got a workout. But now it’s time.
Tick tock. Tick tock.
We’re talking chicken breast, folks. Expensive chicken breast now, because I just read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (it’s outstanding) and will eat only the breast of certified happy, healthy cage-free grass- and worm-eating birds executed with dignity in an open-air abbatoir, thank you very much. We’re talking $7.95 per pound minimum, honey. At that price the chickens better have been raised at a Ramada Inn with access to 24-hour room service, nome sang.
We’re talking a veritable panorama of veggies and fruit, which fortunately I love.
We’re talking a lumpy, cholesterol-reducing, filling sea of Quaker Oats, simmered to perfection and studded with toasted sunflower seeds, craisins, and a slog of lactose-free yogurt.
We’re talking bye-bye white flour, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, salt, saturated fat, and Cheeses of Nazareth, not because it isn’t possible for people to eat these things in moderation and be healthy, but because it appears to be impossible for me to do so.
We’re talking swimming when I think I’m too tired to go swimming.
We’re talking allowing the feeling of hunger to sit gracefully in the pit of my stomach instead of triggering a lot of rash behavior to quell a natural sensation that is NOT to be confused with a feeling of loss, of emotional emptiness, of loneliness, of missing my mother and dad or the nameless, faceless stranger who never fell in love with me.
We’re talking about flipping the switch on the top of my head back to ON.
I was remembering a comment my dad made about my mother. She was fat. Years and years after she died, Dad and I were looking at pictures together and we came upon a particularly unflattering one of Mom. Dad shook his head in bafflement and said, almost to himself, “And she knew I didn’t like fat women.” Excuse me? As if my mother chose to be fat. As if my mother wanted to be fat.
But maybe, just maybe, she did. Maybe she was consciously or unconsciously rebelling against the conditional love my dad gave her; maybe she was saying, "I'll give you exactly what you say you don't like and we'll see if you still love me." Maybe she was testing him, testing herself. Maybe she was rebelling the only way she could against him without telling him to fuck off. Maybe he had found the key to her insecurities and used it to hurt her, to make himself feel more important. Maybe they were caught in a painful tarantella, spinning faster and faster (fatter and fatter) until one or the other dropped dead.
And maybe I've been dancing this same dance, only alone, like a deranged gypsy fortune teller in tattered rags, spinning and banging a tambourine, sweat and drool flying in the air, panicked eyes searching in vain for the disembark platform.
I know exactly what makes me fat: eating too much of the wrong foods. Yet I choose to eat too much of the wrong foods. Can I really hide from myself the fact that, in choosing to eat like that, I am choosing to be fat? Okay, heredity, environment, conditioning, habit, addiction, cross-purposed results, yadda yadda yadda. The truth is, it requires a disconnect to eat as I do, knowing that each mouthful, each choice is a decision to be fat but not "seeing" it as it's happening. It’s like sticking your hand down the drain when the disposal is on, and then lamenting that your fingers are all cut-up and bloody. OF COURSE they are. You put your effing hand down the disposal!
All right, Stevie. It’s time to be honest with yourself.
(1) You know that eating too much makes you gain weight.
(2) You eat too much.
(3) Therefore, you choose to be fat.
No person wants to be fat, right? To be hobbled and burdened with a body of your own devising is downright nuts. To be subject to ridicule and disgust because of what you do to yourself is pure psychosis. To punish yourself - to be self-destructive - to have the biggest, ugliest excuse in the world, to impact every moment of every day with the logistical nightmare of weilding around an enormously heavy body - to be a failure, purposefully - this is mental illness.
Sisyphus was compelled by Zeus to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he reached the top of the hill, the rock always escaped him and he had to begin again. The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for Sisyphus due to the mortal's belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus, but Zeus put him in his place by binding Sisyphus to an eternity of frustration.
At what point in Sisyphus's toils did the boulder turn from a burden into a comforting friend? How long was it before it just felt right, somehow, to spend every moment contending with the rock? Why would such an abhorrent condition become familiar, acceptable, even strangely satisfying?
I'm a dung beetle, rolling around a huge ball of shit wherever I go.
I'm a hermit crab, hidden inside an unwieldy discarded shell that chafes and scrapes me.
I'm a homeless man with a grocery cart full of scraps of plastic and newspapers.
I'm a conjoined twin.
I'm a Senegalese woman with a huge basket of taro balanced on my head.
I'm a soccer player forever passing the ball from foot to foot, never kicking it, never letting anyone have it.
I'm a dog with a huge, slobbery chew toy that I adamantly won't give up.
I'm Paul Bunyan, with my ox Blue on my shoulders.
I'm Sisyphus - and Zeus.
It's commonly believed that trying to lose weight, especially hundreds of pounds, is a Sisyphean task (the new conventional wisdom says there's a 10-20% success rate). I think that being fat is the Sisyphean task, and that losing weight is certainly a formidable job but it can be done, and there is a boulder-free future possible for me. Maybe it's a good thing that the road to health and self-respect chips away only a grain of sand at a time from the boulder I haul, leaving a trail of dust behind me. Much as I wish I could just "go somewhere" and have the boulder magically gone, it's a one-fat-cell-at-a-time process.
Like Gringotts bank, each vault contains a little something held in storage for a rainy day and must be unlocked and emptied purposefully by a goblin. Each fat cell must be unlocked by the need to expend stored energy, the lipid transported by a red blood cell to the liver (or whatever) for processing, and, one by one, as the vaults are emptied, the walls are pushed together, and the whole cave shrinks.
So now I'm in the vault-emptying, boulder-sanding business. At least it's steady work.
Today I dressed in full Dumbledore regalia - hat, hair, beard, and flowing velvet cape - and I was so damned hot all day! Course I expected I would be, but with the wand-waving and spell-casting ("Expelliarmus!!") and the pirouetting to show off my purple cape, I was one hot, hairy bastard! I have upper lip rug burn from the moustache.
